


it goes on

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, post-BotFA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 14:17:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3137429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tauriel handles grief as she has handled every pain she has faced: through gritted teeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it goes on

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lisafer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisafer/gifts).



> For Lisafer's last birthday and therefore written pre-BotFA the movie. I got... somewhat Jossed. Not as badly as I might have been! Never mind. With thanks to Fredbassett for the extremely knowledgeable beta.
> 
> In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. ― Robert Frost

            She has to do it. That’s all she knows: she has to do it. What she has to do is a little beyond her, but Tauriel is almost convinced she’ll think of something. There’s nothing left for her in the Greenwood any more, not even its name. Mirkwood, befouled by evil, was her territory to protect, and she had called it by the name it deserved, even before the king. Now the darkness has leached away with the White Council’s work, and her home is once again the Greenwood. Nine times out of ten, Tauriel even remembers to call it so.

 

            She has been busy since the battle, and she is told that that is how you cure grief, how you stop yourself fading. Since the wounds she sustained on the slopes of Erebor, she has fought a hundred skirmishes, carried a thousand stretchers, led a million hunting and scouting parties. She has had the honour of forming a guard detail for the Lady Galadriel. None of it drives Kíli’s crooked open smile and dark eyes from her mind, and none of it makes the weight of the inscribed stone in her pocket less heavy.

 

            Tauriel takes great care not to look the Lady Galadriel in the eye, just in case. They say that she can read your every thought from your eyes, and these days two thoughts are uppermost in Tauriel’s mind, like rocks that are not worn down by the tide: firstly, _Kíli_ ; and secondly, _it is not given to elves to love twice_. Tauriel’s education was a little piecemeal, but she was still the playmate of a prince and she knows her histories. Galadriel, granddaughter of Finwë, niece of Fëanor, might well have an opinion on the latter point, especially considering Tauriel’s unfortunate hair. Tauriel did not want to find it out the hard way. She feels that this was a wise decision, despite her desperation for someone to unburden her heart to, someone who might be able to tell her a few things that are not known in Mirkwood, things about the Valar and Aulë, who she has learnt to call Mahal, and the fate of his creations.

 

            Lúthien and Beren would not be separated after death, but both their kindreds were of Ilúvatar’s creation. Will Tauriel be granted a similar mercy for love of a dwarf, when she only began to think she loved him once he was gone? Before she dared not name it in herself; she thought she felt only the joy in discovering a new and like-minded friend. It was only when she knew he was dead that she felt loss, that she recognised that a part of her life’s music had fallen silent forever.

 

            Tauriel is proficient in thirty different forms of weaponry if you include different types of bow and styles of wielding a knife, and unarmed combat. These are the lessons she deemed necessary for her life in Mirkwood and suited to her temperament. These are the lessons she set aside healing for, save those basic skills which every elven soldier knows. She never thought she would fall in love: she put that aside for a time without war, as elves do.

 

            _As elves should_ , Tauriel tells herself, obedient to her education and her instincts, but then she remembers Kíli’s corpse, slowly cooling beside his brother’s, and she feels again that she has lost something for good because she thought it wasn’t real.

 

            Tauriel has always had a very clear idea of what is and is not real. Unlike many, she has never hallucinated under the influence of Mirkwood’s evil. She cannot understand how she came to make such a mistake – one both uncharacteristic and unalterable. She will see her parents again in the Halls of Mandos, though she barely remembers them and cares rather less. Kíli, who she never had a chance to know; Kíli, who she could have spent a thousand years with, a thousand years for each of Middle-Earth’s wonders; Kíli, funny and silly and irrepressible and brave and _mortal_ , she will never see again.

 

            Tauriel handles grief as she has handled every pain she has faced: through gritted teeth.

 

 

            Legolas worries, of course. Legolas has been her friend and companion, the older brother she wasn’t born with, for centuries. He knows her and he fears for her. His eyes follow her with a tiny, anxious crease between them.

 

            King Thranduil sees fit to summon her for another speech on the subject of who he will, and will not, permit Legolas to espouse. He ought to know better, but does not. Curious, Tauriel thinks, how paternal snobbery can make him blind, and curious, too, how high Sinda ideals of becoming Silvan dissolve at the thought that a Silvan might marry in to a Sindar dynasty. Tauriel has faced no more difficulties than might reasonably be expected in rising above her half- and full-Sindar peers in the chain of command, has heard few derogatory comments - and her ears are sharp. But Ilúvatar forbid that she should marry a full Sindar elf. Those few families that remain entirely Sindar shudder at the very thought.

 

            Well, she will not, so it is all a moot and slightly awkward point. She is left with nothing other than the fact that Legolas worries about her, about her dedication to duty that does not slack off with the increasing security of the Greenwood’s environs, and her poorly concealed restlessness.

 

            She has to do something, and she does not know what. But whatever something is, it’s not here in the Greenwood.

 

            Tauriel considers her options, and finds leaving to be the only satisfactory one. She tells Legolas so.

 

            His princely face does something complicated that Tauriel does not propose to parse. “But where will you go?”

 

            Tauiel shifts her stance and looks down into the softly babbling brook at their feet. Legolas also shifts, and then recovers as gracefully as possible as the log underneath him shifts too. He does not end up in the river, and Tauriel does not laugh, as she would have done only a few months ago. The complicated expression on Legolas’s face dissolves into concern.

 

            The rune stone in Tauriel’s pocket knocks against her hip, jarring one of her scars from the Battle of Five Armies. She no longer feels it: it’s shiny and pink and healed over, something Bard’s daughter Sigrid exclaims over every time Tauriel visits Dale, which, considering her restlessness, is often.

 

 

            (“Any other woman would have died!” Sigrid had cried when Tauriel prised herself off her cot after the Battle of Five Armies. It had only been two days after Legolas, hissing derogatory remarks about her intelligence and self-presevation skills and bearing a pronounced resemblance to a thwarted cat, had dragged her into the healers’ tent for assessment.

 

            Tauriel had looked at her blankly. “I am not a woman,” she pointed out.

 

            “Sit down, shut up, and let me dress your wounds,” Sigrid had demanded, waving a roll of bandage at her in a very threatening manner for such a young girl.

 

            Tauriel thinks Sigrid will make a fine princess of Dale, even if it causes Tauriel some surprise every time she sees her dressed in silks and velvets and ordering a household instead of wearing a bloodstained apron and using words learnt by the docks of Laketown on recalcitrant soldiers.)

 

 

            The memory of Sigrid, and therefore that orc-infested night in Laketown and Kíli, and the memory of Kíli in the cells of Mirkwood, their conversation about stars, his mother and her desperate hope that her reckless son would one day come home –

 

            Dís daughter of Thráin must surely know that her sons are dead, but Kíli and Fíli were buried in the only things they had at the time of their death, the only things they had brought on the quest. Bilbo Baggins had dressed them for their burial, weak as he was, and had salvaged locks of their hair and a small item - a brooch of some kind – from Fíli’s pockets to give to his mother. But there had been nothing in Kíli’s pockets at all, and his bow had been smashed to pieces in the battle. Bilbo had looked high and low for the rune stone, but had been unable to find it. Possibly because Tauriel, for reasons that still escape her, had taken it.

 

            “I’m a thief, you see,” Bilbo had told Tauriel, his soft eyes watering. “None of these dwarves will notice anything missing, but Lady Dís – she’ll want something of her boys, I know she will, I’m a sentimental old hobbit but I’m good for something…”  


            Tauriel had just nodded, rune stone burning a hole in her pocket, but she was not ready to give it up. She still isn’t, but maybe when she sees Lady Dís she will be.

 

            So when Legolas asks her where she will go, Tauriel knows what her answer is.

 

            “To Lady Dís,” she says. “Thorin Oakenshield’s sister. She is coming from the Blue Mountains with a caravan of their folk, she has not yet reached Erebor, and the roads are still dangerous.” Tauriel hesitates, but she may as well speak. She takes the rune stone from her pocket. “This belonged to her son. I will return it to her, and see her safely to her home.”

 

            Legolas looks at the stone and he looks at Tauriel. His nostrils pinch slightly, which is his best attempt at an annoyed face. If it were less consciously attempted, it would be more striking. “The hobbit was looking for that.”

 

            “Was he?”

 

            “Yes. And you’ve had it all this time.” Legolas sighs, and stares out into the woods. “What makes you think Dís will want your help?”

 

            “I shall have to hope she is more like her sons than her brother,” Tauriel says dryly, and shakes her head. “I will find a way.”

 

            “Elbereth guide you,” Legolas mutters. “I cannot go with you.”

 

            “I know,” Tauriel tells him, and feels a rush of affection for him. If only she had loved Legolas, things would be a good deal simpler. Thorin Oakenshield would probably not sit on his ancestral throne, though. Kíli would probably not live to build a city. Tauriel cannot conceive of a world in which Kíli is dead and she is happy, which says a great deal for her present state of mind and not a lot for her imagination.

 

            “Promise me you will not fade without me,” Legolas says, and in his voice Tauriel hears the desperation of a lonely prince, whose brothers are too old to be his playmates, whose mother is gone, whose father is sometimes loving and sometimes demented, as many wood-elves are apt to be. Whose closest companion is a much younger Silvan elf with alarmingly coloured hair.

 

            “I promise not to fade from this Middle-Earth without giving you notice,” Tauriel says dryly.

 

            Legolas very nearly snorts. A hundred, maybe two hundred years ago, he would have done, but the darkening of the Greenwood has hardened Legolas in a way that may never leave him. “Will you come back?”

 

            “Perhaps,” Tauriel says.

 

 

            It is a very long way to Ered Luin. Everyone would tell Tauriel so, if everyone knew where she intended to go. They do not.

 

            Her departure attracts some interest, but not as much as might once have been expected; while Tauriel retains her reputation for steady reliability, her increasing restlessness, the number of duties she commandeers that take her out of Mirkwood proper, the change in her demeanour have been noted. Mirkwood has much to do, considering the rebuilding of Dale and Erebor, trade treaties and ongoing tidying up after the Battle of Five Armies. Tauriel’s decision to leave, although looked upon as a great nuisance – particularly by Thranduil, who sulks as only kings may sulk – does not cause much more than a ripple of talk. There are other captains of the guard, and most of them are not suffering from an evident, if unacknowledged, disturbance of the fëa.

 

            Tauriel packs up the few things that she requires, sews the pocket with the rune stone in closed, selects a reasonably robust horse – Legolas, being extravagant with those he loves and determined to ensure she comes back, insists she makes her choice from among the royal stables - and leaves at dawn. Legolas is there to say goodbye, but in the end, he says nothing. It is not necessary. He does not want her to go without him, but physical departure is not what he has in mind.

 

            Tauriel and her horse – which is called Rosroch, because it is a sort of reddish colour and Legolas is not very inventive – take passage for Dale. Tauriel visits Sigrid, Tilda and Bain and spends a few hours correcting their Sindarin spelling and grammar before Sigrid sees supper onto the table, and after the younger children retire to bed, she and Bard and Sigrid sit by the fire with a bottle of Dorwinion that Tauriel brought and discuss dwarves. Bard, of course, cannot openly tell an elf from Mirkwood that Lady Dís is, at present, somewhere between the Blue Mountains and the Misty Mountains, probably rather closer to the former than the latter. But he can certainly talk about trade routes, and the possibility that Bilbo Baggins may return to Dale, where his welcome is eternal. Of course, the road from the Shire is a long one, but there are many dwarfish caravans, these days…

 

            Tauriel takes all of the several points that Bard carefully seeds in his talk. He was always a clever man, and while statecraft does not come easily to him, he has a certain guile and shrewdness and a strong sense of justice. And he has an heiress who smiles sweetly and listens closely.

 

            She’s sorry to leave, but not as sorry as she would be to stay. The Celduin carries her downriver, on a flat-bellied trading ship bound for the Sea of Rhûn, and Tauriel parts from the traders at the town where the river meets the Old Forest Road. She has seen off a small party of bandits who do not present much of a challenge, but who apparently alarmed the traders enough that they discount her passage, though she pays for Rosroch’s, since having a horse on board is a tremendous inconvenience for all concerned. One of their young boys is apprenticed to their shaman, and he tries to read her hand. She is six hundred years old, so of course he ties himself up in knots, but when he stammers and rather feebly draws a few conclusions he reminds her of Kíli, though his skin is more golden than Kíli’s was. She doesn’t laugh, it hurts too much, but she does tell him that she is two hundred times as old as most of his customers will be, so he should not worry.

 

            The Old Forest Road is uneventful, given what it used to be. She meets a party of elves that she knows, but they do not ask her questions. She wouldn’t answer them if they did. She keeps apart from other travellers, sleeps mere hours and spends the rest of the time watching the familiar stars. She never got to show Kíli the stars as she sees them: she sat with him on the battlefield as he died and darkness fell, and when the first stars came out she said “Look,” but she said it in Sindarin, and by the time she said it in the common speech, he was too far gone to hear her.

 

            He saw plenty of stars, she consoles herself. Even if they weren’t hers.  As consolation goes, it’s pretty weak; and as consolation does, it fails.

 

 

            Only once she leaves the Forest does she knows the joy she has always wished for, the joy of new places and unfamiliar surroundings, and it tastes empty in her mouth. She wanders, but with a purpose; has a regrettable encounter with a skin-changer who she meets in both his forms, and who tells her that he can smell heartbreak on her skin.

 

            Tauriel shapes her mouth around the word heartbreak, lets it sink in; translates it into the languages she knows as best she can and tries to understand it. The way that elves understand a broken heart feels too serious, too full of legendary sorrow to fit with Tauriel and her tiny, unknown, unspoken story, the little wound in her mind that will not scab over and heal, and Tauriel does not understand how Beorn can say she is broken-hearted over events that lasted less than a loa. In the end she removes her offensive skin as far from Beorn and his Carrock as humanly possible and sets aside the concept of heartbreak for another time. Sometimes, in the darkness, when she cannot sleep and the fire is flickering the same colour as the brightest lights in her hair against the night sky, when the stars are not the comfort they usually are and Rosroch is too nervous for her to feel sensible sleeping, Tauriel reaches out and touches the idea, as if she’s taking a sharp knife from its sheath. The dwarves can make knives with an edge that even she appreciates.

 

            It cuts her every time, and she always puts it away again before the dawn.

 

            The Misty Mountains are hard and grey and silent. There are a few scrabbling little orcs. Tauriel very nearly feels badly about killing them, since they scream at the sight of her, but she does not apply mercy to goblin-kind. She kills them quickly, but that is only sometimes her idea of mercy. Mostly it’s just efficient.

 

            The nights are exceedingly cold and there is a certain amount of snow. Tauriel buys rough blankets from a wide-eyed mountain family and drapes most of them over Rosroch, who dislikes the snow but soldiers on. The Old Forest Road goes over the lowest pass in the Misty Mountains, and they do not leave the treeline, so the snow is not as bad as it might have been and there is sufficient fuel for fires. Rosroch is grumpy, but he will be fine.

 

            Tauriel watches her fingers and toes carefully. She does not trust herself to care for herself, not really. The rune stone bumps against her scars and reminds her that she has already resigned herself to dying once this year, and while she failed last time, she may not next time – and she may not even notice the resolve forming. It would be too easy to let Rosroch loose, or to sell him at the nearest small town, and walk into the snow. In the high biting air of the mountains, Tauriel feels a very long way from home, a very long way from Ered Luin, a very long way from anything holding her to Middle Earth. There is almost nothing between her and the stars.

 

            “I wish you could see this, Kíli,” Tauriel says aloud one night. The sky is as close to black as she has ever seen it, and the stars are chips of diamond, like the diamonds Bofur brought Sigrid, Bain and Tilda, for the shelter they gave him, Fíli, Oin and Kíli.

 

            Bofur had Sigrid give her a pair of fine knives with her name in perfect Tengwar characters. They are lovely and useful, and curiously like and unlike any other pair of knives Tauriel owns. She and Bofur have never spoken of debts and she would never have called in any such obligation, but these knives pay them a thousand times over. They are _extremely_ sharp and they keep an edge beautifully.

 

            Tauriel uses them to dispatch a stray goblin, definitely a scout, and hurries on to the next town, which is actually a small but heavily fortified village, with a solid wood stockade of which she approves. They give her shelter. She gives them news and a deer she brought down a mile or two out of town. Among men, it seems, food ensures her welcome. She wonders if it is the same for dwarves.

 

            She goes to Imladris because she has a desire to see the home of Elrond Peredhil and the Last Homely House. Everything about it is several thousand years older than she is, and it all makes her very self-conscious, especially the glances at her hair. There are probably elves here who have _met_ Fëanorians. Tauriel talks a great deal of Mirkwood and adjusts her accent so she sounds more Silvan, which allays some misgivings, as do her information about orcish movements in the Misty Mountains and her combat skills, as displayed against Elrond’s twin sons – they are older and more skilled than she is, but she is skilled enough, and the fact that she puts up a real fight but is beaten in the end reassures many. She immediately ruins the effect by asking about dwarven caravans. There is not a single person in Imladris, up to and including Lord Elrond – who is as wise and long-suffering as she was led to believe – who can understand why she wants information on dwarven caravans, until she finally descends on the libraries and searches every single bay, nook, cranny and display. She finds several things she does not need, including the shards of the sword of Elendil, a botanical garden, a ten-year-old mortal boy in need of a bath, and a lost half-completed library catalogue. The former two she does not touch, although she spends some time staring at the sword’s fragments. The latter two she delivers unto their respective caretakers, who are pleased to have found them again.

 

            Eventually, she manages to be in the right place at the right time to accost Bilbo Baggins, who was not expecting to see her and has spent the last three weeks wallowing in elven poetry, but who does, at least, understand why she might be interested in dwarven caravans. He is supposed to be meeting them at the Ford of Bruinen in a few more days. Bilbo appears to think this insane, but dwarves travel at all times of year, and it is a long way to Erebor.

 

            “Although I’m not sure they’ll welcome you,” he says, eyeing Tauriel with considerable caution.

 

            Tauriel shakes her head impatiently. She can manufacture some sort of a welcome. “I have something for the Lady Dís.”

 

             Bilbo’s eyes narrow.

 

            Tauriel cuts the stitches binding her pocket closed and pulls out the rune stone.

 

            “Oh,” Bilbo breathes. “Oh, you sneaky –” and then he takes a glance at Tauriel’s face, and he sees what he sees, and he does not finish his sentence. “Well,” he says, after a moment, with an awkward cough. He pats her on the back. “We’ll make a burglar of you yet, eh? Come and have a nice cup of tea.”

 

            Tauriel does not much like tea as hobbits make it. She drinks it anyway.

 

            “I’ll go and meet them,” she says, once she has finished her cup.

 

            “It’s Afteryule,” Bilbo protests, which Tauriel does not understand at all. “You’ll freeze.”

 

            Tauriel stares at him blankly.

 

            “Oh, what am I saying?” Bilbo grumbles. “You crossed the Misty Mountains in Afteryule, what is there to stop you? Stubborn bloody elf.”

 

            “You came to Imladris in Afteryule,” Tauriel points out, handling the unfamiliar word carefully.

 

            “No, I did not,” Bilbo snaps. “I’ve been here since the end of Blotmath, thank you very much, you’ve just been slow to find me.”

 

            “What?” Tauriel says, confused.

 

            “I’ve been here nearly two months,” Bilbo elaborates. “I would have waited and met Lady Dís and her caravan in Hobbiton, but firstly my neighbours are delicate souls and they find me alarming enough as it is, and secondly there’s no earthly way they’ll stop here, and I wanted to spend some time with the elves.” He hesitates. “And I find there’s not very much for me at home any more. I tried, you know? But…” His voice trails off, and then he shakes himself, small and business-like. “You’ll know what that’s like.”

 

            Tauriel considers this from every possible angle. “Yes,” she says slowly. “Yes, I do.” After a while, she says: “It hasn’t been so long. Time will smooth this over. I only – the quest only lasted a little while for you.”

 

            Bilbo gives her a look in which pity and sadness are mingled. “You’re very young, Tauriel, aren’t you? If you don’t mind my saying so.”

 

            “All things are relative,” Tauriel says, which is neither a yes nor a no.

 

            “It’s been two years,” Bilbo says baldly. “If you and I were going to forget, Tauriel, we would have managed it by now. Some things, no matter how brief, always burn brightly in your memory.”

 

            Tauriel thinks that an elf needs a great deal longer than just two loa to know if they’re going to forget something or not. She also thinks that Bilbo Baggins is onto something with his discussion of burning. Kíli does burn brightly in her memory, as brightly as dragonfire on the waters of the lake. All the things she’s lost that she never had a chance to hold. All the missed chances.

 

            She does not even take the knife she calls heartbreak out of its sheath, and yet her palms are dripping blood from a thousand tiny cuts. Bilbo’s watching her as if he knows that.

 

            Tauriel’s knuckles are white on the rune stone. It’s not necessary but she sews it back into its pocket. She will not be parted from it, by accident or somebody else’s design. She is beginning to worry that she will not be able to give it up to Kíli’s mother.

 

            Lord Elrond is not at liberty when Tauriel wants to leave; she takes leave of Lady Arwen instead. Arwen is as lovely as the stars and more than four times Tauriel’s age. She fits in this sprawling, mosaic safe haven of remembered splendour and lore, and everything about it that itches at Tauriel’s skin suits her perfectly: its very age, its style and beauty. Tauriel feels uncouth in her presence, and also as if she has come face to face with Elbereth.

 

            The only thing Arwen says that is not formal and formulaic is _I hope you find peace_ : so perhaps not Elbereth, but Nienna. Tauriel is struck dumb and stammers a great deal. Arwen does not appear to mind very much.

 

            Tauriel feels a thousand times more at home under the open stars, in search of the Lady Dís’s caravan. It is a very large caravan, according to Bilbo. She was unwilling to leave anyone behind who might be of use to Erebor or wished to go there, and perhaps she was also unwilling to see her brother’s and her sons’ graveyard; and after all, Dáin Ironfoot is well bedded in as King of the Lonely Mountain. Occasionally Tauriel wonders why Dís is not Queen, but she does not think this is a question she should ask yet. If ever.

 

            Perhaps she can get Bilbo to ask it instead.

 

           

            She locates the caravan on the Great East Road, somewhat past a place the local people inform her is called Midgewater, with excellent reason. She does not want to approach just yet; under cover of night, poor cover considering dwarven eyesight but sufficient for her, she watches them and their camp. They look purposeful. She catches the occasional glimpse of Dís. She also looks purposeful, and very much like Thorin Oakenshield, except that her nose is blunter, like Fíli’s, and her eyes are dark, like Kíli’s. Tauriel’s heart does something in her chest that makes no sense, but hurts a great deal.

 

            She follows the caravan with great care. She does not want to frighten them or put them on their guard, but she cannot think of a way of approaching them that will not arouse their suspicion, and she does not wish to be shot on sight: they will probably not trouble to check her pockets and her journey will be wasted. She scouts for them, because it is the only thing she feels she can do. It is not a wasted thing. She disposes of a stray warg, no doubt lost from the orcs’ breeding grounds, that takes an undue interest in a couple of young dwarves too far from the caravan. She also handles a group of bandits that follow the caravan from a small town and attempt an ambush which is fundamentally unsuccessful, since Tauriel picks them all off before the caravan gets within bowshot. She is, however, obliged to leave the corpses, because the caravan moves too fast. This is not up to her usual standards.

 

            By the time Bilbo Baggins has joined the caravan, at the Ford of Bruinen, they are definitely aware that someone is following them. Tauriel ties Rosroch up a considerable distance away and gets closer than she ever has done before, close enough to hear Bilbo and Dís talking and watch the flames of the campfires dancing.

 

            Dís is telling Bilbo all about the mysterious benefactor that keeps killing things that get in their way. Tauriel cannot read Bilbo’s expression, but there is definite wry amusement there. And sadness, for some reason.

 

            “Oh, I think I know who that is,” Bilbo says. “She said she’d find a way to introduce herself, but as elves go, she’s a very awkward little thing. It comes of being young. If she were a hobbit, I’d say she was hardly more than a tweenager. I suppose in dwarfish terms, she’d be about Kíli’s age.”

 

            Tauriel neither accepts this assessment nor knows quite what to do with it.

 

            “ _What_?” says Dís, who evidently feels similarly for very different reasons.

 

            “She made friends with your son Kíli,” Bilbo says, clearly enjoying the thoroughness with which he has put the cat among the pigeons. “She tried very hard to save him at the Battle of the Five Armies, and when she couldn’t, she took a keepsake. She journeyed from Mirkwood to bring it back to you, but she seems to be stumbling a little at the last hurdle, _aren’t you, Tauriel_?” He stares pointedly into the darkness.

 

            Tauriel stays very still.

 

            “I don’t think there’s anyone there,” Dís says, but nods to her guards anyway. They start to move. There is a certain amount of clanking.

 

            Tauriel assesses their weaponry and decides she would rather come quietly.

 

            “Oh, I think there is,” Bilbo says. He’s looking somewhat to the left of her, which ruins the effect from Tauriel’s perspective, but not from anybody else’s. As a kindness, and in the hope that he will stop her getting killed, she moves somewhat to the left before stepping into the light with her hands well above her head.

 

            “Lady Dís,” she says. Her voice is cracked, though not as badly as it was when she came down from the mountains; she hasn’t spoken to anyone in a while. She clears her throat and eyes the weaponry pointed at her. There’s a lot of it. “I come in peace. May I lower my hands?”  


            Dís lays down a ladylike and well-maintained crossbow. Already, she looks as if she never lost her composure. Tauriel admires her. “You may. Mr Baggins…”

 

            “I have a great deal of young cousins,” Bilbo says, looking insufferably smug. “I thought that would work.”

 

            Dís eyes him for a long moment, then shakes her head as if dismissing it. “Elf, what do you have of my son’s?”

 

            “A… stone,” Tauriel says with difficulty. “He told me it was a charm that you gave him. To bring him safely home.” She clears her throat again. “I, er, I sewed it into my pocket. I did not want anyone to take it from me.” She throws Bilbo a meaningful look, and he comes and cuts it out of the correct pocket, with a great deal of fuss and a tiny penknife.

 

            She takes it in her hands. It’s warm from where she’s kept it. It feels like a live thing. It’s as dark as Kíli’s eyes, but it’s not as bright. It’s heavy for its size, but when she takes one wavering step forward, and a second, and presses the stone into Dís’s broad, strong palms, the weight is not gone from her empty hands. It’s still there.

 

            Salt water is running down her face. She can hardly see for it.

 

            “You’re crying,” Dís says, astonishment apparent in her voice. “I didn’t know elves could cry. Mr Baggins, did you - ?”

 

            “I presumed they could,” Bilbo says waspishly. “Most sentient creatures do.”

 

            Dís heaves a sigh that sounds like an avalanche on the move, and pulls a square of linen from her sleeve. “Here, elf. Dry your tears, sit down, and tell me the whole story. From the beginning, mind you.” She gives the guards a significant nod.

 

            The weapons lower rather reluctantly, and Tauriel sits down and blots her face. Haltingly, she begins to speak. Each word is easier than the one before.

 

            She is under the stars that Kíli was born knowing, and the fire still burns.


End file.
